President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) signed an MP (provisional measure) this Monday (2) that extinguishes Funasa (National Health Foundation) and transfers the body’s attributions to the ministries of Cities and Health.
The measure was published in an extra edition of the Official Gazette on the first working day after the mandate took office. The text will only take effect from January 24th.
Funasa was created in April 1991. The agency was coveted by political parties for carrying out sanitation works in small municipalities.
The health team in the transitional government had suggested that Funasa’s activities be divided between the Health and Cities portfolios to avoid duplication of actions.
Lula’s team also assessed that the body lost focus and started to prioritize the execution of works with funds from parliamentary amendments.
Executive Secretary of the Civil House, Miriam Belchior said that the new government wants to include Funasa’s actions in the discussion of the Ministry of Cities on sanitation.
The MP determines that the Ministry of Management and Innovation in the Public Service gradually transfer Funasa’s structure and employees to other bodies of the federal administration.
The text also says that servers will only be transferred to other bodies after their agreement. If there is no federal public administration body or entity able to receive the server, it may be transferred to the local public administration of another federative entity.
In 2022, the agency had a budget of BRL 3.4 billion. Of the investment budget, directed mainly by parliamentarians, more than R$ 540 million were invested in services to improve basic sanitation in small rural or traditional communities.
The text signed by Lula states that actions related to health and environmental surveillance will be transferred to the Ministry of Health. The Cities folder will carry out “other activities”.
The government has preserved part of the attributions in Health so as not to increase the difficulties of meeting the sector’s minimum expenditure.
The diagnosis of the people who participated in the discussion is that the agency was inefficient and a focus of clientelism, with competition for positions in Funasa’s state structures.
A diagnosis raised in the transition points out that a restructuring of the body made in the Bolsonaro government created about 700 commissioned positions to be distributed in exchange for support in Congress.
During the transitional government, the idea discussed was to bring Funasa to the Ministry of Cities. With President Lula’s decision to hand over the portfolio to an allied base party, the focus changed and it was decided for its extinction.
The fear now is that the parties that disputed positions in the body react negatively to the measure.
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